Nicolas Roeg :: Walkabout

In the Australian desert, two English children survive thanks to a young Aboriginal boy on his ritual journey. Roeg films the land like a score.

Before the desert even opens, a sound: an electronic piece by Stockhausen, Hymnen, crackling like a radio badly tuned to the world, and then — abruptly, with no transition — the circular drone of a didgeridoo. Roeg sets these two sounds side by side in the opening minutes: two temporalities that never touch, the European avant-garde and an instrument that knows nothing of the future because it lives in a time that doesn't run in a straight line. Walkabout is the film of that friction.

The plot, stripped to the bone, is almost a parable: a father drives his two children into the outback, sets the car on fire, shoots himself; the girl and the boy are left alone in a land the culture they come from has always described as empty. Their rescue comes from an Aboriginal boy — David Gulpilil, in his first time in front of a camera — on walkabout, the long ritual journey that marks the passage into adulthood. From here on the film stops telling and starts watching: Roeg's zoom, his own cinematography, pushes into close-ups of lizards, ants, bark, as if the landscape were the real narrative matter and human beings only figures crossing it.

This is where the film gives its gift and sets its trap, in the same gesture. The gift is one of the highest renderings ever filmed of landscape-as-score: Roeg watches the outback with the intensity he'd found in the Australian painters and records its sounds with an almost musical clarity, until the desert stops being a place and becomes a voice. Every rustle, every insect's screech is composed, not captured. The landscape dictates the story.

The trap is the exact reverse of this enchantment. That desert Roeg fills with microscopic life and firelight is presented, in narrative terms, as empty — a land to cross, to survive, waiting for someone to name it. But the outback isn't empty: it's tended and inhabited for millennia, managed by a culture that knows its every water and every fruit, and it's precisely this knowledge the film shows (Gulpilil hunting, finding water) without ever recognising it as knowledge, reducing it to instinct, to the animal grace of the "noble savage" emerging mystically from the rock. Indigenous criticism has said it bluntly, leaning on Marcia Langton and Said: the enamoured camera takes part in the same erasure as colonial landscape painters like John Glover, who painted Australia pristine and awaiting settlement, erasing those already there. The proof is in the sound itself: the very didgeridoo that opens the film is Gulpilil's own, and it goes uncredited — the one Aboriginal voice in the score, erased from the titles. Roeg humanises Gulpilil more than his time did — the boy's tears before the white hunters slaughtering buffalo for sport are one of the film's sharpest moral indictments — and yet he remains an Englishman watching, and the landscape he hands us is beautiful precisely because it's been emptied of the presence that once lived in it. It isn't a flaw to be fixed: it's the contradiction that keeps the film alive, and that a purely aesthetic reading can't see.

The same goes for time. Walkabout refuses linearity — the editing jumps, anticipates, doubles back, overlaps — and it's been suggested Roeg stole this atemporality from the Aboriginal conception of time, which persists rather than flows. It's the same logic by which the ending doesn't close: the girl, now grown, in a bourgeois flat, remembers the desert and the boy who saved her life, and in that memory the longing is for something she never had, only passed through without understanding — a longing for a time and a place that were never hers, that she inhabited as a stranger and that comes back to her, years later, like an echo of didgeridoo beneath the radio. The boy's walkabout is a rite that leads home; hers is an exile in reverse — civilisation as the real desert.

After the credits, the film leaves the same residue as the rock in Picnic at Hanging Rock, where another Australian landscape swallows and doesn't give back: the sense that the land was there before us, that it will go on after, and that we — with our radios, our zooms, our enamoured cameras — were never anything but guests who mistook watching for knowing.